Blog entry for:

i give them the room they need to work things out in their own lives. by reminding them that i am not able to solve their problems for them, i give myself the freedom to live my own life.
freedom, what an elusive concept. sure i am grateful for freedom from active addiction, and yes i am grateful for the freedom to choose the direction my life is headed on a daily basis, and most of all i am grateful for the freedom to accept and love myself just the way i am today. i have often wondered why it is, that my family members do not see that this manner of living is without parallel and continue to spin out in the fiery destruction of obsessive and compulsive use. more than once i have tried fruitlessly to help them see that their lives can be so much more if only....
each and every time i have attempted to be more than an example, i have been put exactly in my place. and yet.....
i still want to jump in and rescue them from the consequences of their behavior. the ironic part of this whole line of thought is that when i was using, i never wanted to share what i had with them. in fact i went to great lengths to hide the exact nature of what i was doing from those who were still a part of my life. now that i have some time clean i see that i am truly powerless over what they see and how they choose to live their lives, and i am totally honest and open about how i live my life. they on the other hand have drawn away from me and hide the true extent of what and how much they use from me. they feel their actions are trying to protect me from temptation and perhaps they are correct. i believe they are doing what they do because they love me, and since i am powerless, to them it implies some sort of weakness. what they do not have is that my FREEDOM arises out of the admission of being powerless and the actual truth of the matter is that they do not need to understand that concept.
the reading however is about what i do, and how i can and cannot help my family members find this manner of living. as much as i desire they are no different from me before i came to see that my life was going in a direction that was unacceptable to me, they could not stop me from destroying myself, and i am just as powerless over them for the exact same reasons. the only action i can take is to live my life by example and let them know that there is a different path they can choose to take. beyond that simple step there is little more that i can do. i know that counselors and therapists out there will argue the need for intervention and treatment, and that is what they believe. i know neither of those options would have done me a lick of good. treatment for me, taught me how to speak the language of recovery, how to act as if i was accepting recovery, and how to comply with powers greater than me. i did not recover until i was scared enough to accept a different course of living, so why should it be any different for those i love? so off to meet a few responsibilities and live me life in a spiritual manner, hopefully to be an example of what recovery has to offer.

∞ DT ∞